Formalized Application of Systems Engineering Processes to the Development of the Purple Line SharePoint Test Tracking Tool

Testing & Commissioning (T&C) for a $2 Billion project generally consists of more than ten thousand tests, and the Purple Line Light Rail system being constructed in Maryland is no exception. The Purple Line Light Rail is expected to have at least twenty thousand tests conducted in its T&C phase over the next 3-4 years. Given the number of tests, their pre-requirements, resources (manpower, equipment, facilities) and the test reporting procedures to be used to comply with the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA), the Purple Line Transit Constructors (PLTC) felt a need for an online system that could be used to log and track tests. This Thesis focuses on the formalized application of Systems Engineering processes, in accordance with ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288:2015, to the development of this test tracking tool. The Stakeholder requirements given by MTA and PLTC are converted to System requirements, and a Test Plan for the tool is developed in parallel. The tool is designed by PLTC in collaboration with a subcontractor to meet the System requirements and will be tested before going live

On the Use of Cloud Computing for Scientific Workflows

This paper explores the use of cloud computing for scientific workflows, focusing on a widely used astronomy application-Montage. The approach is to evaluate from the point of view of a scientific workflow the tradeoffs between running in a local environment, if such is available, and running in a virtual environment via remote, wide-area network resource access. Our results show that for Montage, a workflow with short job runtimes, the virtual environment can provide good compute time performance but it can suffer from resource scheduling delays and wide-area communications

Scientific Workflow Applications on Amazon EC2

The proliferation of commercial cloud computing providers has generated significant interest in the scientific computing community. Much recent research has attempted to determine the benefits and drawbacks of cloud computing for scientific applications. Although clouds have many attractive features, such as virtualization, on-demand provisioning, and "pay as you go" usage-based pricing, it is not clear whether they are able to deliver the performance required for scientific applications at a reasonable price. In this paper we examine the performance and cost of clouds from the perspective of scientific workflow applications. We use three characteristic workflows to compare the performance of a commercial cloud with that of a typical HPC system, and we analyze the various costs associated with running those workflows in the cloud. We find that the performance of clouds is not unreasonable given the hardware resources provided, and that performance comparable to HPC systems can be achieved given similar resources. We also find that the cost of running workflows on a commercial cloud can be reduced by storing data in the cloud rather than transferring it from outside

A study of feto-maternal outcome in case of premature rupture of membrane at a tertiary care center

Background: Premature rupture of membranes is the rupture of the fetal membranes in the absence of uterine contraction or before the onset of labor. When this occurs before 37 weeks of gestation, it is termed as preterm premature rupture of membranes. Management depends upon gestational age and the presence of complicating factors. An accurate assessment of gestational age and knowledge of the maternal, fetal and neonatal risks are essential to appropriate evaluation, counselling, and care of patients with PROM. The purpose of the study is timely diagnosis and appropriate management of the cases of PROM and PPROM to improve maternal and neonatal outcomes. Methods: A Prospective study was performed at the department of obstetrics and gynecology, at a tertiary care center from August 2020 to December 2021. A clinical data sheet was made for recording all information about the pregnant women after taking their consent. And their maternal and neonatal outcomes were recorded. Results: a total of 150 cases of PROM and PPROM were taken during our study out of which 53.33% belong to the younger age group, 43.33% were primi gravida, 66.66% belonged to the lower socioeconomic class, 25.33% had a previous history of abortion followed by dilatation and evacuation, rate of cesarean delivery was 34.66% and rate of NICU admission of neonates was 15.78% and 57.87% babies had low birth weight and rate of stillbirth was 1.97%. whereas 34.66% of cases had various complications related to PROM. Conclusions: Individualized management of PROM cases depending on the gestational age and risk of complications and antibiotic coverage is the best way to achieve a good fetomaternal outcome

New tools and methods for direct programmatic access to the dbSNP relational database

Genome-wide association studies often incorporate information from public biological databases in order to provide a biological reference for interpreting the results. The dbSNP database is an extensive source of information on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for many different organisms, including humans. We have developed free software that will download and install a local MySQL implementation of the dbSNP relational database for a specified organism. We have also designed a system for classifying dbSNP tables in terms of common tasks we wish to accomplish using the database. For each task we have designed a small set of custom tables that facilitate task-related queries and provide entity-relationship diagrams for each task composed from the relevant dbSNP tables. In order to expose these concepts and methods to a wider audience we have developed web tools for querying the database and browsing documentation on the tables and columns to clarify the relevant relational structure. All web tools and software are freely available to the public at http://cgsmd.isi.edu/dbsnpq. Resources such as these for programmatically querying biological databases are essential for viably integrating biological information into genetic association experiments on a genome-wide scale

Workflow task clustering for best effort systems with

ABSTRACT Many scientific workflows are composed of fine computational granularity tasks, yet they are composed of thousands of them and are data intensive in nature, thus requiring resources such as the TeraGrid to execute efficiently. In order to improve the performance of such applications, we often employ task clustering techniques to increase the computational granularity of workflow tasks. The goal is to minimize the completion time of the workflow by reducing the impact of queue wait times. In this paper, we examine the performance impact of the clustering techniques using the Pegasus workflow management system. Experiments performed using an astronomy workflow on the NCSA TeraGrid cluster show that clustering can achieve a significant reduction in the workflow completion time (upto 97%)

The First Provenance Challenge

The first Provenance Challenge was set up in order to provide a forum for the community to help understand the capabilities of different provenance systems and the expressiveness of their provenance representations. To this end, a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging workflow was defined, which participants had to either simulate or run in order to produce some provenance representation, from which a set of identified queries had to be implemented and executed. Sixteen teams responded to the challenge, and submitted their inputs. In this paper, we present the challenge workflow and queries, and summarise the participants contributions